Manchester housing maintenance workers strike

Unite activist Ian Allinson interviewed shop steward Colin Pitt about the ongoing strike for pay parity and against housing maintenance on the cheap.

Manchester City Council has got rid of its council housing, which is now run by housing associations such as Northwards Housing, outside whose offices strikers were protesting on Friday. Maintenance, formerly carried out by the council’s Direct Works department, has also been outsourced. The 180 strikers are employed by Manchester Working Limited / Mears. The Council retains a significant stake in Manchester Working, and strikers believe the council has the power to ensure the dispute is settled.

Colin Pitt, one of the shop stewards, explained the situation:

Employers have responded aggressively to the action, threatening to stop holiday accrual (which would not be legal) and to clamp strikers’ cars. Strikers are angry that their pay lags far behind that of people doing similar work for other employers. The strike has a wider significance because other bosses are now using these workers as a “benchmark” to justify not giving pay rises for their own staff.

The strikers are mainly former members of the UCATT construction union, which recently merged into Unite and sits within Unite’s construction sector.

The workers want to escalate the strikes, which have been going on for five weeks and are currently Mondays, Thursday and Fridays, to every day. To do this, they need support.

There’s an excellent Guardian article at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/15/long-builder-chain-for-grenfell-a-safety-and-accountability-issue about how the Grenfell refurbishment was done by a complex chain of contractors and sub-contractors. It raises questions about whether anyone really takes responsibility for the whole of the work when projects are structured like this. As the editor of Building Design says, there was a time when councils had their own architects. When I worked for Manchester Housing Department in the 1980s the Council had both City Architects and Direct Works departments. You can see how privatisation and outsourcing lead to poor quality work, sometimes with tragic results.

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